


Bergamot Among Other Things

by monaboyd_archivist



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-21
Updated: 2004-03-21
Packaged: 2018-04-11 13:47:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4437824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monaboyd_archivist/pseuds/monaboyd_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orlando tries his hand at poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bergamot Among Other Things

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Shirasade: this story was originally archived at the Monaboyd.net Archive, which was closed in September 2014 due to software issues and a lack of new submissions for several years . To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in October 2014. I e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact me using the e-mail address on the Monaboyd.net Archive collection profile.

The moment I woke up, I knew Orli wasn’t there. There was a rare silence in the room that I could taste. I didn’t have to sleepily grope his side of the bed to feel its emptiness, but I did anyway.

So Orlando had left. Left; gone, somewhere, not here. I knew it wouldn’t be for long. But as he wasn’t there at the moment, his pillow would do. I yanked it to me and smothered my face with it, deeply breathing in the Orliness. Floating back to me was the smell of his cologne and memories of his smile; both were bergamot like warm pungent orange, dry juniper, woody sensual patchouli, and the ginger. Oh the ginger; spicy, warm, almost floral, and bringing memories of hot summer nights feeding each other ripe gold apricots, and photographing how they looked just like his skin only like velvet to silk.

I threw all tangled bedding off me and looked to the forest out the window, and suddenly knew what to do with this Sunday.

Twigs cracked softly under my bare feet as I stalked through the murky trees with camera at the ready. No conscious aim for either the camera or my feet, but they both seemed to know where to go. A click here at bars of morning sunlight and a click there at the clouds beyond the spindly branches, but I was following a scent behind the ruse of wandering aimlessly. The scent of bergamot, patchouli and ginger especially.

On a bed of fluffy moss in a clearing lay my prey. Shirtless, shoeless, soundless, lazing comfortably on his stomach and his hair falling in his face as he held his head in one hand and wrote in his journal with the other. Sunlight filtered in and fell upon his elegantly contoured body and on his elegantly messy script on the half blank page. Kicking against each other to a beat that only he could hear, his feet bobbed weightlessly in the air and he reminded me of a child sitting in a chair too tall.

He was too absorbed to hear the stealthy click of my camera, even when I adjusted it to let more light in and it ground out a more leisurely cachunk. This man was my camera’s prey, my soul’s sun, my body’s god. And though I have told him in every way possible he still cannot understand.

I had one last frame to make the roll complete. I spoke, quietly as if to myself, but he heard it still in this forest where time and the light itself seemed to stop and hold its breath.

“I love you.”

His head came up, his heels came down towards his back, and his smooth shoulders tensed with alertness. I caught that in my camera, with his bangs dangling in his eyes and his mouth opened slightly in surprise. My Orlando.

“Hi!” Relaxed into a grin showing perfect teeth, inviting me to sit next to him. I set aside my camera; he set aside his book. I didn’t lie on my stomach but sat with legs crossed by his side and began to stroke his back; and he made a noise quite close to purring.

“So, Orlando, what is a nice boy like you doing in a forest like this?”

I could hear the smile in his voice, which was muffled by the moss as he rested his head on his folded arms. “Mm... nothing. Just thought I’d come out here to write. Really pretty place.”

“You seem to have forgotten your shirt.”

“Did I? Huh. It was early, and I was asleep, and it was warm, so.”

I smiled. “If you were asleep how could you tell?”

He pondered this. “Well, if it were cold then I would have noticed.”

Nestling more comfortably into himself, he seemed to be asleep but I knew better.

“What was it you were writing?”

“Oh, just a poem. Nothing earth-shattering.”

I stopped rubbing his back. “Oh come on. Can I read it?”

He twisted around to look at me, as if to say, “Are you sure? It’s really bad, man.” I looked back. Under the icy gaze of my stony visage (that I’m sure looked more like “I love you so much” than “let me read it now”), he gave up and handed the journal to me. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I found the last entry, not needing to peek at what scrawlings came before.

“You have shown me a whole new way to live  
You've given me the best gift that you could give  
I hope you see me in the light that I see you  
Because I love you and I will always be here for you.”

I stared at the page blankly, disbelieving. There it was in his own handwriting- proof that I didn’t deserve this man.

“Pretty pathetic, what?”

I shook my head, tearing my gaze from the book and meeting his soft chocolate eyes. “No. It’s beautiful.”

He frowned at looked at it again, trying to see it through another person’s eyes. “Still pathetic.”

“It’s worlds better than anything I could do.”

He sat up now, amused. “Oh please. That’s like saying I’m a better singer than Billy.”

I laughed with him as I remembered what Orlando’s singing was like. He continued.

“I don’t think I could ever do anything as well as you, Viggo. It’s like you’re the legend and I’m the... I don’t know, just the one who trails along after hoping to someday be as great, do you get what I’m saying?”

I regarded him for a long time, feeling silly. “So that’s why you traversed all the way out here, why you start writing poetry and walking around barefoot. You see me doing things like that and if I concatenate all those acute fugues I acquire the impression you desire to be like me, so you begin replicating those things whether it’s conscious or not. The fact that you want to be more like me rather than more like yourself is more adulation than I’ve had in a very long time.”

Because Orlando was stunningly beautiful when he was confused. “What?”

“Nothing,” I murmured as I leant in to kiss him, smiling.

 

The End


End file.
